In application server, cloud, or other computing environments, a common task for a system administrator is the need to patch or otherwise update a particular application, perhaps from a first version to a second version. To address this, the administrator may need to perform a series of steps on each server node within a domain, in order to rollout the patch, while trying to minimize application downtime.
However, in a shared application server environment, for example one that supports multitenancy, each server may be acting as a shared resource, for use by several tenants, and shutting down a server to update a particular application may cause the patch rollout for one tenant to affect the operation of another tenant. These are some example of the types of environments in which embodiments of the invention can be used.